Great was my joy to see RealBasic appear in a text in PC Pro, a British magazine, in the section Real World Computing of the April 2013 issue (I am one issue behind in reading...). However, this joy was short lived as you will see from the quotation:

Kevin Partner, PC Pro April 2013, page 72-74

Quote:

I keep up with the best coding tools by repeatedly leaping into tomorrow's wunderkind language, from Visual Basic to Director Lingo, RealBasic to Flash, and PHP, Python and a little jQuery. It's meant acquiring plenty of now-redundant expertise (PHP is one of the few to have lasted), but it's made it possible to create bigger projects with smaller teams.

I think it is great that he has tried RB. Sadly, this may have been years ago and his remark of redundant languages does have a point. Many of the plugins and controls to be found for RB appear on websites that seem to be stuck in the middle ages and are probably no longer maintained. However with Cocoa-support getting ready and all eyes on iOS at the Conference, RB might make a comeback. As a community we should spread our knowledge and fun in programming more, so RB gets back on the radar.Anyway, it might be a good idea for RB to contact Kevin Partner on the current status of iOS and the upcoming IDE-change. Help him change his mind and strengthen the community.

But Realbasic is not only about the language, it's about the IDE, language and what the community does with those in combination.The problem with the realbasic plugins or classes that are shared is the way thay are developed and can be maintained. It's not that simple as a php script wich is always just a flat file and where a huge code database of snippets are to be find.

This is completely beside the point I was making, the point is, he thinks RB is obsolete. And this has probably got everything to do with lack of support for mobile platforms, for which there is a great demand at the moment. Not being able to use your code on these platforms makes RB less attractive, while at the same time programming in for example Objective-C in XCode and programming Java has become easier because they offer more of the rapid development functions for graphical user interfaces that made RB such a good choice back then.

RB as a language is a good one. It is pretty close to many other languages, including php, to start working with it right away and it has lots of built-in functionality. It misses the large community though, that helps speed up development with a choice of free libraries filled with special components and functions.

Also don't forget, the languages Partner mentions are not there for the same purpose. It's not a contest. It is his observation that these languages provided quick and easy solutions at the time he used them, but have been surpassed by other technologies now. PHP is the exception to this, as it is and will remain for quite some time a good language to create web-based functionality. It is not at all a competitor to RB (you might argue WE tries to compete with PHP).